day 0: submission postponed
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
This is where I’d have liked to write Yay, we’ve submitted and we’re ‘waiting for review’ but instead I’ll write what status is. We set this goal for a reason. Having a goal, a deadline to work against is crucial to move forward. And since we set the date we’ve moved a long way but didn’t make it all the way. And it’s ok.
The world doesn’t collapse, and no-one will probably even notice in their holidays if we release in two weeks or in four, or four months. The world’s survived for centuries without ambadoo, and can probably wait another few weeks for its arrival.
We’ve been working hard with extremely limited resources, way less than what we had when we estimated the timeframe for this milestone. And you can only do so much every hour, day and week. Yesterday I still naively believed that we somehow would make it today, still so until this afternoon Fredrik said: I’ll be honest, brutal and harsh: “there’s no way in heaven we’ll make it today”.
I admit, I was still hoping but understood it was a dead run, and to be honest I wouldn’t like to have submitted the app in the state it is in. We’re so close, making it it even harder to give up. But it’s good with reality checks. Today we all got one: You can’t make wonders with hands tied.
What now? We keep moving. It’s all about finding solutions, and do that as fast as possible. The release might be postponed but it will nevertheless come, one way or another. And it will be awesome whenever that day come.
-48h : bare minimum
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
Yep, it’s about the time we’ve left until submission. Including sleep. We’re crunching tickets & hunting bugs in wicked speed. The app is actually getting in a stage where it’s useful and actually make sense.
But we’ve come to the point where it’s about removing everything that isn’t absolutely needed to be there for it to make that sense. This might change until friday so I won’t make that list until we’ve submitted the app. Even in your own profile we’re asking ourselves what’s absolutely necessary.
bare minimum.
Addresses? Jobs? Tags? Names? Ok, name might be a good idea. But that’s what we’re doing now. Listing & prioritizing from the bare minimum and then in order what’s most important. Sync to server, quite important, adding friends, quite important, not messing up your address book, VERY important.
So what we have on Friday afternoon is most probably what some people would call a minimum viable product, and others proof of concept. No matter what, its main purpose is to show it to the world its potential, gathering feedback and building from there. As Steve Jennings just said: Launch and Learn.
Even then, we know how fast people judge. How many seconds do you give an app that doesn’t work, lag, behave strange or you just don’t see the meaning of? 1 min, 30 sec, 10 sec or less? I know myself when I download something I’m very quick to give a thumb up, tweet & talk about it, or just move it to ‘archive’
Do we get more than one chance? I don’t know, but I believe that an app that does less, but does that well, have a bigger chance than an app that does it all but nothing well. Until Friday we’ll make sure that, no matter how little the app does, it does it well.
day -7: design & reality
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
As a designer, it’s easy to dream away with visions of the final beautiful product you’re about to launch. You have this, sometimes blurry, sometimes crisp clear image inside your head of a perfectly stitched together app.
Functionality is one thing. Clicking a button should return an action, pulling a door handle should open the door. Today we can take all that for granted. We expect things to work. What design does however is taking the experience to a whole different level. From being: Ok > Wow.
Design can make you angry if it’s done poorly, it’s pissing you off , or if done well it touches your emotions. It makes you happy, and sometimes you just hover that thing because it triggers something inside you, like when you find something hidden.
Design takes time, and a hell of an effort. From the very first idea of a concept to the very last pixel. A button can be way more than a button, and a table can be a table that you thought didn’t exist.
The original Tweetie for iPhone is a really good example of where design is built in to the core of the app. It’s so well done, it has set a whole new standard in app design. Things like the pull-to-reload we tend to think exist in all apps now, because it feels so natural.
We’ve been working parallel with the iPhone and web app for the past weeks and it’s becoming very clear that designing the two is very different. Designing for the web you pretty much only has to know .css (cascading style sheets) and can change things instantly, whereas with the iPhone you either have to hand over Photoshop/vector files to the developers or you have to know Objective-C (the programming language to code iPhone apps.
Finally reality hit us this week. There’s no way in heaven we can implement the design we’d really want and still make the deadline. What to do? Standard UI elements. Apple has a made a kit of elements to get the ‘iPhone App Feel’ that every developer can use, maybe since they know developers are not designers. But it kind of hurts in a designers soul to fall back on those components as they’re totally generic and soulless. But reality wins this time.
Right now it’s more important to actually get this baby out of the belly to show the world, than to fiddle with rounded corners and shades pleasing the designer soul. The designer (me) has to be reminded it’s still just a proof of concept we’re making.
day -8: smiles & cries
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
An awesome & intense week @ ambadoo labs has come to an end. We’re getting really close and now it’s one week to go until App Store submission.
Magnus Palmér has been totally crushing the back-end. He was only in the project for two and a half week but what he contributed with makes all the difference. Today was his last day at Jayway, the company who’s responsible for all technical development.
It’s sad he’s leaving, not only was it a joy working with him, but he contributed with many thoughts about the whole eco system and would have been great to have on the journey. Right now we have no one that takes his place, but hopefully we will have very very soon. Anyone up for ruby + neo fun? (ping @ronge)
With the hard work in the backend we’ve been able to move along a lot. Most of the basic functionality is in place, or will be Monday. Then we have one week to polish and break test it, so when you download it, there won’t be any surprises.
Aside with the development we’re now preparing launch :D not a day too late. I have been waiting for this as much as you, believe me. It’s been a long, bumpy journey to get here but I guess that’s how it is, or can be. For every blocker there’s a new lesson – and we’ve learnt a lot of lessons. Yet, we’re still on the runway – waiting to take off.
Now some hours of rest.
day -10: Website in the Works
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
Website In the Works
For you who’ve followed ambadoo know that ambadoo.com has been static, very static. The current site is a temporary old one that we put up when we realized the other was broke. The old site was connected to the application that we removed, hence, broken.
It’s been hanging there, waiting for the real thing to happen and was never meant to do any magic more than saying Hello World.
We’re re-building the site from _blank. It was time to hot it up and actually explain what we’re doing a little bit more in-depth this time.
Web App, Hot.
We’ve good flow in the Web App development now with lots of small goodies implemented. Some UI stuff, like maps on addresses but the more interesting part is in the Facebook integration, which is about to be really awesome!
We’re continue to fight against time on the iPhone development. Things are harder, and takes more time than we’re hoping but we’re making progress and by the end of this week we should have reach 100% functionality for this version. That might be only 5% of what we’re imagine we’d like to implement but it’s the five most important percentages.
This is a web app, not a native. It’s stunning what you can create with HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and some php programming. However, there are things that you can’t do from a web app and where native are still superior. We’ll continue to develop both to take advantage of what the two platforms has to offer.